Sonic Booms and U

"Sonic booms have been felt before in San Diego, notably in 2009 and 2006. The 2006 incident was traced to naval training flights 120 miles offshore:
www.huliq.com... ."

I am not implying anything alien but what could be going supersonic across my area and the world? I understand we have equipment to travel this fast
and that was as early as the 1960s. Could this be something different since we are always 10-20 years behind super secret airplane/rocket projects,
and the booms have really picked up everywhere if you just search the site, I just pulled 2010 data and found these below. If something is traveling
MACH 1 so much, why or what are we after? Like the police officer says, "Why are you speeding, where is the fire at son?" I know our military
knows we can hear planes going sonic just from WIKI info.

Look at this though from the same wiki link, could this be something we can all be hearing this new device?

“In 1964, NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration began the Oklahoma City sonic boom tests, which caused eight sonic booms per day over a
period of six months. Valuable data was gathered from the experiment, but 15,000 complaints were generated and ultimately entangled the government in
a class action lawsuit, which it lost on appeal in 1969.

There has been recent work in this area, notably under DARPA's Quiet Supersonic Platform studies. Research by acoustics experts under this program
began looking more closely at the composition of sonic booms, including the frequency content. Several characteristics of the traditional sonic boom
"N" wave can influence how loud and irritating it can be perceived by listeners on the ground. Even strong N-waves such as those generated by
Concorde or military aircraft can be far less objectionable if the rise time of the overpressure is sufficiently long. A new metric has emerged, known
as perceived loudness, measured in PLdB. This takes into account the frequency content, rise time, etc. A well known example is the snapping of your
fingers in which the "perceived" sound is nothing more than an annoyance.”

You ask, "what the hell our government has to produce this?" Well, it has 651 F/A=18s (Mach 1.8); 2,231 F-16s (Mach1.2 @sea level); 168 F-22s (Mach
2.25); a couple of SR-71s at NASA Dryden (Mach 3+); 402 F-15s (Mach2.5+); a few soon to be retired B-1Bs; 501 T-38s (Mack 1.3), and; a handful of Migs
and Sukhois used in ACM training. They also shoot off a lot of large supersonic pointy things from Vandenburg AFB up north of your area. San Diego
is home to a large number of military air bases, particularly the Navy/USMC flavors.

Thanks 4nsicphd for the info, I knew we had birds that fast, some even speculate faster but what is the speed for over huge cities? Really is there
any known good reason to fly over MACH 1 anywhere near 30 miles of general population except for being attacked?
I find the overwhelming evidence of the sonic booms happening everywhere all the time, and if that is true then again "where is the fire" if it is a
plane.......if not a plane then what is making the sonic booms?

All of the military services have regulations prohibiting supersonic flight near populated areas of the ContinentalU S. But there are exceptions.
For example, the FAA routinely announces TFRs (Temporary Flight Restrictions) limiting or banning aircraft from the area around events like
Presidential visits, the Super Bowl, the Ky Derby, etc. If an aircraft wandeers into such an area, gighters will be scrambled and will go supersonc
to get there ASAP. That happened in Seattle in August. seattletimes.nwsource.com...
It can also happen accidently. The speed of sound depends entirely on the composition of the medium carrying the sound and the temperature of the
msdium. You can figure mach 1 with the formula a = sqrt [g * R * T] , where a is the speed of sound, g is for a ratio of specific heats (1.4 for air
at standard temperature and pressure), R is the gas constant for the medium (286m^2/s^2/K for air), and T is for temperature in Kelvins, which is
273.15 plus degrees centigrade. So you can be cruising along in afterburner (but not for very long because the burner uses all the fuel you can carry
very quickly) and hit a patch of warmer air. BOOM!
I remember one year at the Reno Air Races, I was performing in the daily airshow when a F-15 demo pilot doing high sped passes lost concentration
and went >Mach 1.0 It knocked over cardboard trade show displays, babies started crying, and the announcer told the crowd that they had just seen a
demo of how to go from Major to First Lieutenant in a half a second.
And the boom can go a long way so if the Navy is doing F/A-18ACM training off the coast, the shockwaves can trael quite a ways.

I used to live near a huge AFB where strategic air command was billeted back in the early '80s. About twice a month or so, the fighter jockeys would
take off, hit the afterburners and cause a BOOMso loud that it seemed like an elephant had dropped onto the roof of the house.

I live 120 miles south of an American Air force Base and understand planes fly around but can there be other objects that make sonic booms. I live on
the beach so sound travels further but really; the experts please help, is this possible that when they hear a sonic boom in San Diego I can hear it
120 miles south? If we are not allowed except for special permission to go over Mach 1 then why are they happening everywhere all the time? I
believe some planes are going mach 1 over my airspace and elsewhere like in Seattle but these make news. I also believe there is more to this and
researching into other sonic boom phenomena to find it.

I have been to an airshow and have heard a sonic boom, I have had planes fly over me extremely fast with burners on and not break the sound barrier so
I know that sound, hurts by the way.

The sound I hear is a typical super gun shot sound but clumped together off the west coast of Baja California, and yes I know what a machine gun
sounds like, I live down here and its not a gun, too big a sound but I could be mistaken.
I have confirmation around the same times San Diego hears it as well, but sometimes it is not reported so I can not confirm all the booms.

Can this be something off the coast with meteors, planes, highspeed weapons, a new jet? Anyone have any ideas? Crazy ideas welcome too......

One possibility is that you are hearing the F-15B Sonic Boom Project flying out of NASA Dryden, up north of your area. They have fitted a
telescoping boom on the nose of an F-15B to research the ameliorating effect of effective length on dynamic overpressure, which is what a sonic boom
is. One way to tell if it is an aircraft causing the boom is to listen for 2 distinct booms, one from the nose/wing interface and the other from the
tail area. A bullet or artillery shell only causes one boom, or actually a crack. Or if you could put together a Yielding Foil Membrane Blast
Overpressure Guage, per www.osti.gov...;jsessionid=62144E72D5D94BBEB90B2D8BCDAD1C8A?purl=/4439623-B4bDQG/ a pressure profile
can be obtained which can be correlated with object size, speed and altitude.

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